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Can you locate all 16 voivodeships of Poland?
Can you place all 290 municipalities of Sweden?
Can you locate all 9 states of Austria?
Can you locate all 15 counties of Norway?
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The Netherlands is divided into twelve provinces and, below them, into the tier that actually runs the place: 342 gemeenten. Every Dutch address sits in exactly one, the boundary is signposted, and the name is on the street signs, the bins and the parking machines around you. This page is the whole list, grouped by province the way the game groups it.
A gemeente is the bottom tier of Dutch government and the one that does most of the work: schools buildings, waste, roads, planning permission, social care and the civil registry. It is run by a council elected every four years, a college of aldermen drawn from it, and a burgemeester who is not elected at all but appointed by the Crown, which is the fact that surprises everybody from outside. There is nothing below this level with any power, so the 342 shapes on this map cover the country with nothing left over and nothing left out.
The number keeps falling, and that is the other thing to know before you start counting. Dutch municipalities have been merged steadily for a century: 537 in 2000, 431 in 2010, 355 in 2020, and 342 since the start of 2023. Almost every merger produces a name that is not a town, which is why so much of this list reads like geography rather than a gazetteer: Súdwest-Fryslân, Het Hogeland, Westerkwartier, Hoeksche Waard, Land van Cuijk, Molenlanden, Berg en Dal and Dijk en Waard are all recent inventions covering a dozen villages each.
The name is not always the town you have heard of. A municipality is usually named after its largest place, but it holds every village around it too, so Súdwest-Fryslân covers dozens of towns and villages and Amsterdam has been one municipality with Weesp since 2022. In Friesland the official names are Frisian rather than Dutch, which is where Tytsjerksteradiel, Noardeast-Fryslân and Waadhoeke come from.
For a photograph, this is the finest administrative clue the Netherlands offers. Many municipalities put their name or their coat of arms on the street name signs, most of them badge their own bins, parking machines and works vehicles, and the white boundary signs on the road name the one you are entering. Failing that, the blue place name sign gives you a village, and the village gives you the municipality if you know this map.
The traps are names that repeat or move. There are two municipalities called Bergen, one in Limburg and one in North Holland, and the register keeps them apart exactly as this game does, with the province in brackets. Hengelo carries its province for the same reason, because there was a second Hengelo in Gelderland until 2005. Rozendaal, a village north of Arnhem, is a municipality of its own and is not Roosendaal, the town of 77,000 in North Brabant at the other end of the country. Baarle-Nassau on the Belgian border is the one shape on this map with holes in it, and the holes are Belgium: nine enclaves of Baarle-Hertog sit inside it, which is not something to fix your click on. Beware also of the town that is not the municipality: Delfzijl, Appingedam and Loppersum are all still towns and have not been municipalities since they merged into Eemsdelta in 2021, and Uden and Landerd became Maashorst the year after.
Each province can be switched on and off on its own in the start dialog, which is the only sane way through a list this long. Flevoland is six answers and ten minutes, North Brabant is a project, and nobody should meet all twelve at once.
Two names in that list are not the ones in the municipal register. The Hague is formally 's-Gravenhage and is Den Haag on every sign, station and map, so Den Haag is what this game draws. Nuenen, Gerwen en Nederwetten is three villages in one municipality and the only official name with a comma in it, which would read as three separate answers in a list like the one above, so it appears here under the abbreviation the municipality itself signs with, Nuenen c.a.
The largest municipality in the country, covering the southwestern corner of Friesland along with a wide slice of the IJsselmeer that this map draws as water rather than as municipality, and a good illustration of how a merger names itself: five municipalities went into it in 2011 and the result took a compass direction and a province rather than any of their names. Dozens of towns and villages are inside it, Sneek and Bolsward among them, and the name is Frisian because Friesland's official municipal names are.
The easternmost of the Wadden islands and the smallest municipality in the country by population, with fewer than a thousand people. Four of the five inhabited Wadden islands are a municipality each in Friesland and the fifth, Texel, belongs to North Holland, so the row of islands across the top of this map is five free clicks and one boundary worth remembering.
Under eight square kilometres across the IJssel from Arnhem, and the smallest shape on this map: one town, a bridge and almost nothing else. Oegstgeest, Krimpen aan den IJssel and Heemstede are the same story in the west, each of them a single built up area that stayed independent while everything around it merged. These are the clicks worth zooming for, and the reason this map has no help circles drawn on it: a circle big enough to catch Westervoort would cover Arnhem and Duiven as well.
Worth knowing because older maps disagree with this one. Brielle, Hellevoetsluis and Westvoorne, the three municipalities on the island of Voorne west of Rotterdam, merged into a single one on 1 January 2023 and took the number of Dutch municipalities from 345 to 342. Count them on a map printed before then and you will be three out, in the same way Amsterdam swallowed Weesp the year before.
342, and the number has been falling for a century: there were 537 in 2000, 431 in 2010 and 355 in 2020. The last change was on 1 January 2023, when Brielle, Hellevoetsluis and Westvoorne merged into Voorne aan Zee. The three Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba are special municipalities of the Netherlands and are counted separately from these 342.
The Dutch municipality, and the lowest tier of government in the country. It runs waste collection, local roads, planning permission, school buildings, social care and the civil registry, and it is the level a resident deals with for almost everything. Each has a council elected every four years, a college of aldermen drawn from the council, and a mayor.
No. A burgemeester is appointed by royal decree for a renewable term of six years, on the recommendation of the municipal council, and chairs both the council and the executive college. Proposals to elect mayors directly have been debated for decades without changing the practice, which makes the Netherlands unusual in western Europe.
Because they are merged. When several municipalities combine, naming the new one after the largest town is a political decision the others tend to refuse, so the compromise is usually a regional or geographic name. That is where Súdwest-Fryslân, Hoeksche Waard, Het Hogeland, Land van Cuijk, Molenlanden, Dijk en Waard and Maashorst come from, none of which is a town you can drive to.
Amsterdam by population, with roughly 900,000 people, followed by Rotterdam and The Hague. By area it is Súdwest-Fryslân, which covers the southwestern corner of Friesland along with a large slice of the IJsselmeer, and it stays the largest on this map even though the lake is drawn as water here. At the other end, Schiermonnikoog has the fewest residents of any municipality, fewer than a thousand, and the smallest shapes on the map are single town municipalities such as Westervoort and Oegstgeest at under eight square kilometres each.
Look at anything the municipality pays for. Street name signs often carry its name or coat of arms, waste bins, bin lorries and parking machines are usually badged, and white boundary signs on the road name the municipality you are entering. Otherwise work up from the blue place name sign at the edge of every built up area: that gives you a village, and the village gives you the municipality.
The tier above this one is Netherlands Provinces, and the twelve answers there are the twelve groups here, so it is the place to start if this map is too much at once. For another country at this level, Germany Districts and Indonesia Regencies are the other two maps here below the provincial tier, and France Departments is a step above it.
